Anything but...

An Arab friend of mine was on the phone to his parents the other day. His parents are quite liberal and they have a fairly open relationship. He's been trying to (hitherto successfully) court a pretty young Jewish lady. Despite being Christians their Arab roots predispose them to a variety of prejudices towards whole peoples (Iranians, Shia, Jews, Kurds, Africans... you name it). Thus it's somewhat wise to run a check with the old folk whether they pass the Arab Parent Satisfaction Test (henceforth patented by Iraqi Chav).

So he drops the following question:

'What do you think about me dating a Jewish girl?,' he asks (aptly)


To which his Dad responds...




(...wait for it...)






'So long as she's not Islamic.'


Haha! Genius!

Don't do this in your backyard

Skydiver survives 5000 foot free fall (video)

ouch!

Well deserved

Despite it being 2:51 am i've dragged myself out of the warm clutches of my quilt in order to face the cold world of the internet. But I tell you, and I tell you this emphatically, it is worth it.

Having been woken roughly ten minutes ago by the family dog Zena (see pic) anxiously whining outside my door I somehow tore myself from the warm nest that is my bed and took her outside. Poor lady, the first thing she did when she got to the garden was let out a god-awful burst of diahorrea of the type that makes you:

(a) ask yourself whether that was really you or a shit-canon posing as your anus
(b) hope to god that nobody intends to use the same toilet for at least two years
(c) feel that death is a lenient punishment for letting something like that out into the wider world.

Well Zena here's a tribute to you for being so kind and considerate to us that you held it in and were determined enough to drag me out of bed to ensure you didn't do it in the house.

Cheers girl!

Full English anyone?

Surely taking love for the Full English Breakfast that one step too far.

Alas!

...a religious man says something worth hearing.

How sad it is that there aren't many more men like him saying what he says publicly.

Mr Chips strikes again...

For those of you in need of a light-hearted moment:

A blast from the past!

Sunni-Shi'a conflict?

Amidst the copious media rhetoric surrounding a clash between Sunni orders and an emergent 'Shia arc' it is wise to return to an short yet apt comment on this issue by Fouad Ajami:

'The wellsprings of this impasse are to be found in the more prosaic impasse between order and its radical enemies.'

One can only begin to understand the complexities of the alliances formed in the Middle East once we shed this simplistic framework of modern middle east conflict. Thence the apparently absurd ties formed between radical Sunni (Hamas), authoritarian Allawi (Asad regime) and radical Shi'a (Moqtada Al-Sadr) can be understood as the protagonists are clearly more ideologically flexible than most analysts would give them credit for.